EDITORIAL

RUSSIA'S REVOLUTION has remained intensely controversial for every one of the 80 years since it took place. One central charge made time and again by right wing and liberal critics of the revolution is that the peaceful emergence of a parliamentary regime was frustrated by the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917. Mike Haynes's rebuttal of this argument is unusual in taking the options of Russia's rulers as its starting point. He emphasises the political choices made by the parties of the right and by the socialist supporters of the government. He concludes by demonstrating how these strategies failed to address the most fundamental concerns of the Russian masses and so propelled them towards adopting a revolutionary solution to the crisis.

WAR IS often said to be the midwife of revolution. But it didn't seem that way at the start of the First World War. Then chauvinism and patriotism seemed much more popular among workers than revolutionary socialism. But by the war's end right wing certainties had been shattered. Megan Trudell explains how and why workers' and soldiers' consciousness became so transformed.

A NEWLY PUBLISHED eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution written by British journalist Morgan Philips Price is reviewed by Judy Cox, while the fate of the Russian Revolution is explored in Pete Glatter's review of Victor Serge's Russia Twenty Years After. Gill Hubbard examines Paul Le Blanc's restatement of the relevance of the classical Marxist tradition, From Marx to Gramsci.

CHRIS BAMBERY provides a framework with which to understand the increasingly speedy disillusionment that many Labour voters feel with Britain's new government in his review of a collection of books on Labour's past.

Return to Contents page:
Return to International Socialism Journal Index Home page